


The Silent Surface of What Has Gone

by literaryFRIVOLOUSneophyte



Category: Marble Hornets
Genre: Disabled Character, Domestic, Other, Post-Canon, Post-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-25
Updated: 2014-10-25
Packaged: 2018-02-22 12:50:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,385
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2508464
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/literaryFRIVOLOUSneophyte/pseuds/literaryFRIVOLOUSneophyte
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They get the hell away from the East Coast, and they move in together.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Silent Surface of What Has Gone

**Author's Note:**

> warnings include mentions of dissociation, panic, anxiety, a reclaimed q slur, and vomit. title taken from alela diane's "take us back."  
> jessica & brian & tim are in some kind of vaguely platonic and vaguely romantic poly relationship. brian has some pretty serious spinal cord injuries after his uh. fall. so he needs a cane, and a wheelchair for longer distances and stuff.  
> this is preparation for a longer thing i hope i actually can sit down and write haha

They get the hell away from the East Coast, and they move in together.

Jessica's parents gave them some cash from the college fund they had been saving for her, and they bought a one-bedroom house by a highway. Not many questions were asked, and the ones that were – they shrugged in unison, Tim's hand shaking as he tried to keep a hold of the drink they offered him. Her parents were happy enough that their daughter hadn't gone down the same deadly, drug-laced path as her sister, and were all too willing to get some line of communication set back up with Jessica.

Generous, kind-hearted people, unlike Tim's mother. And Brian called his parents once (just once, because they all like to forget the time he tried again, which he definitely did not, because he only called once, of course) and hung up when it started dialing. 

(Brian stared out the window as the phone rang. His hands clenched and unclenched the handle of his cane, knuckles white. The phone rang. The phone rang.

The phone rang, a sharp sound that skittered across the dull beige walls and back at him, and he took in a sharp breath. His bedroom had been painted a light blue and had been filled with photographs of his family, his smiling friends, and blurry ones of himself; his mother's room was a shade of purple, and always smelled like the cat shelter she worked at. There must be pictures of him still hanging up in the hallway. When he went to see his dad, it was all formal, dark red walls. Smelled like plastic. The phone rang.

Where did his dad live now? How were the cats doing at his mom's workplace? Was he an uncle by now? The phone rang. The phone rang. The call went to voicemail.)

They own a single mattress, a dirty, flat piece of shit with the shape of their bodies forever marked on its surface. It doesn't matter, since Tim tends to sleep everywhere, Brian passes out on the couch too often to count, and Jessica always ends up on the floor. But, when they're all together under the blankets, it's...nice. Somehow the dirty, flat piece of shit becomes comfortable with Tim's arm thrown over Jessica and Brian's snoring loud in Tim's ear. 

Jessica fills out the taxes, the paperwork, the shopping, and all the other Normal People Things they've forgotten how to do. She remembers the least of the Thing They Won't Talk About, being the least involved, so slotting herself back into Normal People Things isn't as hard as it would be for Tim and Brian.

(Brian sniffs at the warm smell rolling out of the kitchen. “You really shouldn't have,” he says, a sad smile on his face.

“It's just soup. All we've been eating is TV dinners and ramen, you know?” She pours a bowl for herself as Tim wanders into the kitchen next.

“What smells good?” he asks with a yawn.

“Dinner,” she tells him. His eyes go wide and darts towards the clock. She adds, softer, “It's seven. You took a nap after work.”

Tim looks at her and then down at the floor, as if inspecting the cracks and the stain from that horrible night when he couldn't stop vomi – he looks back at her, and nods in a jarred kind of way.)

Jessica holds a job the longest out of the three. Brian is – some days he is shocked to see his face in the mirror, some days he feels that throbbing empty place in his brain and has to be assured it is actually, really empty there, and he is actually, really here now.

Empty spaces bother all of them. Jessica likes the manual labor of her job, the focus she has to give to the task at hand. There's a lot missing in her memory. There's a lot she never dares remember. When Tim grumbles in his sleep, the warmth of his body turns menacing, and she is back in a hotel and the _thump, thump, thump_ of his heart becomes the _thump, thump, thump_ of the walls of her room.

(It feels almost wrong to get sick in the middle of the night, like she doesn't deserve to feel bad, to feel scared, to gnaw at her nails when the trees scratch the windows.

She feels The Thing They Won't Talk About haunting her childhood memories, memories that should be the last precious thing to cling to, and wants to make it a Thing She Can Talk To With Tim, at least.

Tim vomited all over the floor. When Jessica turned on the light, yellow and fluorescent and blinding in the quiet one A.M. darkness, she quickly turned it off and went back to rubbing Tim's back and scrubbing what she can't see. Ever since then there's been a faint black mark on the kitchen tile.

He followed it – into the woods, she did too, once, left the playground and followed it down a dirt path – as a child, she saw him talk about it in the videos – but in the morning it is The Thing They Won't Talk About like always.)

Meanwhile, Tim can barely find work and barely wants to find work.

(He complains at his Cocoa Puffs during breakfast. “Nobody wants to hire me. Nobody wants to hire – some queer with schizophrenia and, God, no one wants to hire someone with a shit work record like mine. This is the West Coast! Isn't this supposed to be liberal gay Hell?”

“Unfortunately,” Brian says, “the gay agenda does not give good pay.”

“Doesn't cover medical insurance, either. Hormones, your physical therapy, my therapy, all that.” Tim's expression is flat, his eyes bitterly downcast, but he tries to smile.

“Do you think I should go into therapy?” Jessica's voice is never small and it breaks Tim away from his cereal.

“I don't know. How good of a liar are you?”

She shrugs, and gets her Pop-Tarts out of the microwave.)

Money gets tight, but Jessica's parents promise they won't ever let them go bankrupt. They get to sit down at a table for Christmas and stuff themselves silly, and they get cards on their birthdays, already accepted as part of Jessica's family.

Tim finally gets a job in the town over, and Brian texts him “i loce you” the night before his first day, to make sure he gets it when he wakes up. “i *love you too,” he texts back.

(He gets fired after a couple months when he disappears for a week. The indent of his area of the mattress hurts when Jessica rolls over in her sleep. Brian coughs, and coughs, and coughs through his panic.

Tim returns with red eyes and a set jaw; Jessica desperately wants to punch him when he knocks on the door.

“You live here, you _live_ here.” She hugs him so tight he wheezes. “You don't have to knock.”

He apologizes over and over again, but Brian and Jessica feel like the ones that need to apologize when he sags and admits, “I just – before I went back for Jessica, I made – I made gravestones for them. I had...to go and...”

They sleep together that night.)

They survive, basically.

(They give up, a lot of the time.)

With the help of Kickstarter and many nice strangers on the Internet, they save up enough money to afford a wheelchair. Brian starts to leave the house more often. The fresh air makes the dissociation and anxiety a little less worse.

He goes to the ocean thirty minutes away from their house and, while crossing back and forth across the beach, he decides he will “go full indie movie” and get back into his old hobby of photography. Back in college, he had been more of an actor than a director, but realized he mildly knew how to work a camera.

(College is whispered about whenever mentioned. It brushes too close against the borders of The Thing They Won't Talk About.)

Their income depends on Jessica's manual labor and Brian's self-employment - based mostly in the blogging sphere, as freelance as photography can get, but chipping in with the bills feels satisfying.

Tim tries.

(There is another stain on the kitchen floor.)

**Author's Note:**

> everything is fine


End file.
